Lovers and Newcomers (49 page)

‘Is he still acting?’ Joyce wanted to know.

Polly knelt beside his body. She laid her head to his chest, her mouth shaped to a cry but no sound coming out of it. They were trying to loosen his clothes. She heard confused voices crying out for air, water, a telephone.

This has been the longest night I have ever lived through.

I can see Selwyn lying on the floor. I am staring down at the fingers of his left hand as they uncurl, slowly and tenderly, as if he is letting go of something deeply precious.

I know for certain that he is already dead.

Yet for what seemed like an hour, Toby and Sam and Colin took it in turns to kneel at Selwyn’s side, blowing air into his stopped lungs and compressing his chest with cruel thumps of their hands. Counting the breaths, willing a tremor into him, watching for a flicker in his darkened face.

Polly knelt there too, with her head bowed and Selwyn’s hand folded between hers. She was whispering encouragement and endearments to him. Their children looked on, drawn into a huddle, silent and white-faced.

The paramedics came running into the room with their cases of implements and coiled wires. They worked on him, but even as I prayed I knew with the detached, dry kernel of myself that they wouldn’t get him back.

Selwyn was carried out of my house on a stretcher. Polly went with him in the ambulance and Colin drove the three children after it. The rest of us sat anyhow. The kettle was put on and tea was made, then left undrunk. Eventually Joyce fell asleep amongst the cushions on the drawing-room sofa. I tucked a rug over her shoulders and folded it beneath her feet. Amos and Katherine waited, not speaking to each other. Their boys murmured in a corner of the kitchen. Jessie and Nic sat together, awkwardly holding hands.

The telephone rang at last, splitting the silence, and I snatched it up.

‘Col?’ I said.

He told me that Selwyn was dead on arrival. The time of death had been given at approximately ten-thirty p.m., when we were playing charades in front of the fire as if we had all our lives ahead of us.

The doctors had told them that the heart attack was so huge he would probably have known nothing about it.

I heard myself whisper, ‘I see. Yes, I see.’

I remember thinking, this means Sel won’t be able to get the barn properly finished. He’ll be angry about that.

Colin said he would be bringing Polly and the three children back home to Mead. He wanted me to be there when they arrived, but he thought it might be best if everyone else withdrew.

I put down the phone. There was no need to say anything. Katherine came and we held each other for a moment.

I was grateful to Amos for taking charge. He told Sam and Toby that they should go back to the cottage. If there was anything they could do, he forestalled them, he would come and collect them. He said that he would drive Jessie home. She picked up her coat and they went off into the night. I filled a row of hot-water bottles, then wondered futilely if I should make some sandwiches. The kitchen was messy with the debris of dinner. Did I have enough food in the house for the next days?

Nic slid away to bed, her face blotted with tears. Katherine and I woke up my mother and between us we helped her upstairs. I broke the news as she sat on her bed.

‘Who’d have thought I’d outlive him?’ she kept saying. Her hands on our arms were knotty and dry as dead leaves.

When Joyce was asleep Katherine and I waited together. We washed glasses, rinsed and dried them and put them away, moving around each other, hardly exchanging a word. Shock silenced us.

At last we saw the lights of Colin’s car sweep over the field grass beyond the yard gate. I went out into the dark and held open the gate. They came slowly, in bewilderment, letting Colin and me lead them into the barn. After the long weeks of chill in there I was struck by the warmth lingering in the big room. Colin found the switches and lights blazed. Selwyn’s jumper lay discarded on a chair. Polly picked it up and held it to her face.

The two girls clung together. They were deadly pale, their eyes ringed with smudged mascara and puffy with tears. Ben made them sit down and brought them a small glass of brandy apiece. His shapeless face had taken on firm, sombre contours.

‘Drink this up,’ he ordered, and they did as they were told. Omie’s teeth clinked against the rim of the glass and she coughed helplessly. Ben stroked her shoulder until she caught her breath.

Polly was sitting at the table, her hands spread flat in front of her. I covered her left one with mine and our rings grated.

‘Would you rather Katherine be here with you?’ I whispered. She shook her head. ‘Stay with me. Stay with us.’ Colin nodded at me over her head.

Polly and I sat there for hours and hours. Colin went quietly away, and it was Ben who saw his exhausted sisters to bed. He came back again to check on his mother and me, then rolled himself in a blanket and stretched out on cushions laid in front of the fireplace.

‘Remember Katherine and Amos’s wedding?’ Polly whispered to me.

‘I remember.’

Selwyn was Amos’s best man. I was done up in the Ossie Clark dress in which I had planned to marry Selwyn, even though Polly and Selwyn were an acknowledged couple by this time. A self-absorbed and strikingly careless gesture, I thought, in shame at myself. I began a mumbling apology, but Polly dismissed it.

‘Do you remember Selwyn’s speech?’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘He read out that poem by Robert Herrick.

Then be not coy, but use your time; And while ye may, go marry: For having once but lost your prime, You may for ever tarry.’

She recited it in a low voice, then smiled at me.

‘He found that himself. Is that surprising? I don’t think it was. Selwyn believed in marriage, even though we never did it ourselves. I suppose it was me who didn’t want to, not him. He was a traditional man, beneath it all.’

‘He was. He was a believer in one’s prime, too, and in not tarrying.’

The impatient, surging, hot-blooded essence of him seemed to rise up and fill the whole room. His son was breathing evenly on his mattress of cushions. I curled up inside myself, the first intimations of loss stabbing through shock’s anaesthesia.

‘We loved each other, you know,’ Polly said.

‘Yes.’

Tell her, I ordered myself. Grief and guilt goaded me beyond reason. My mouth opened and out came the first words.

‘Polly, I have to tell you something. I won’t know how to deserve your friendship if I don’t tell you.’

She turned to look full into my face.

‘No,’ she said.

That was all, one cold dry monosyllable, but it was as explicit as if written on a page for me to read.

Don’t try to absolve yourself by confessing. Don’t damage Selwyn’s memory for me. Keep what you know to yourself, and live with the knowledge of it.

We held each other’s eyes. Her eyelid twitched with weariness, but I was the one who looked away.

‘It’s nothing,’ I murmured.

We sat on together until it was almost morning.

Polly pulled Selwyn’s jumper around her shoulders but she was still shivering. I asked her if she would like to lie down in her bed for an hour or two, and she said that she would.

Now, in my own bedroom, I lean my forehead against the cold window glass and stare outside. There is grey in the sky between the trees, and the striking of the Meddlett church clock is just a reverberation in the chilly air.

‘I love you,’ I say aloud to Selwyn.

Another secret to add to the legions that each of us hides in our hearts.

FEBRUARY

FIFTEEN

The strip lights hummed as they walked down the avenue of bones, past the metal racks stacked with boxes labelled
Hum F, complete
. Chris held open the door to his office and Katherine followed him inside. Severe air conditioning lent the air the sterile tang that she remembered from her first visit, when he had placed the torc around her neck and astonished her by saying, ‘I so much wanted to do that.’

She put her fingers to her throat, remembering the ornament’s cold weight.

‘Where is it now?’ she asked.

‘With the Iron-Age metals experts, undergoing XRF.’

She raised her eyebrows. His work jargon was becoming a joke between them.

‘X-ray fluorescence. To determine the metal content. And other tests. None of this happens quickly. The pieces have a long history, it takes time to unravel it.’

They touched hands. It was still remarkable to them that their lives had somehow tilted together. Sometimes Katherine woke in the night and reached out to make sure that he was there, that it was really Dr Christopher Carr breathing beside her, only to discover that he too was awake and reassuring himself that she was with him. In spite of everything that had happened in the last weeks, Selwyn’s death and the end of her marriage, she didn’t think that there was any other time in her life when she had felt so vitally in the place and the moment. This, she finally understood, was probably what being in love meant. The condition withstood even the harshest external circumstances.

‘Show me the new finds?’ she asked.

He unlocked the safe. This time he lifted out a tier of plain cardboard boxes. Inside the largest lay a series of polythene pouches. One by one Chris unwrapped metal ornaments and laid them on a piece of folded cloth for her inspection. They were dirty and corroded, crusted greenish-black with verdigris. They looked less glamorous than the torc and shield, but Katherine had learned enough from Chris by this time to understand how important they were. He pointed to each object in turn.

‘Amber and metal alloy brooch, two more brooches and the chain to link them together, two decorative hair tresses, and a pair of gold earrings.’

‘She must have looked very fine, don’t you think, dressed up in all her glory?’

‘To primitive people she would have appeared no less than a goddess.’

From the second box he produced the iron wristlets that protected her arms from the fierce recoil of her bowstring, and a scatter of sharp flint arrowheads. She had been a true warrior.

‘What’s in there?’ Katherine pointed to the third and smallest box.

She had heard much about this last of the finds retrieved from the sports holdall. The newspapers after the recovery had all shown pictures, and Chris had appeared on the local news again to discuss it. But hardly anyone except the police and archaeologists had seen the real thing as yet.

Chris lifted out a cocoon of cloth, and gently peeled back the layers to reveal it.

The gold cup was crumpled at one side, but it was still magnificent.

It lay heavy in her hands, shining because the pure metal did not corrode. The body was decoratively ridged and the rim incised with a scroll pattern. The handle was a ribbed curve of gold, fastened to the body of the vessel with leaf-shaped rivets. Chris showed her how the cup would have been hammered from a sheet of soft metal formed into shape over a block of wood. For a piece so old, he said, the workmanship was extraordinary. She traced her fingertips over the rim, imagining where the princess would have touched it with her lips. This physical link made her seem almost present in the room with them. Then she touched the smooth rounded base. The cup wouldn’t have stood up on its own.

‘Why is it like that?’ she asked.

‘It wasn’t made to be set aside. It would have been too significant. So the child slaughtered and buried with her might well have been her cup-bearer, because she would have needed to take him as well as the cup itself with her on her journey into the afterlife.’

‘But you don’t know for sure?’

Chris shook his head.

‘In my world we don’t know many things for certain. And because the site was so badly disturbed by the looters, we lost all the context. But still, to have recovered these pieces at all goes a long way to compensate for that.’

It did compensate. He was so enchanted by this Iron-Age treasure, and the depth of his passion for it made him lovable in her eyes.

‘Tell me what you do know?’

The work by David the osteologist and others on the two sets of bones was complete, and the skeletons were boxed up in the repository.

Chris returned the cup and the ornaments to their places in the safe.

‘She was somewhere in her thirties. She was tall, about five foot six inches, and fairly well nourished on a mixed diet of grains and a little meat. Her teeth were bad, and she would have suffered from toothache. We don’t know what she died of, though. There are no specific skeletal indications. It could have been pneumonia, tetanus, a tumour, an aneurysm or even poisoning. We shall never know.’

In her mind’s eye Katherine saw the burial ground, and the views over the pastures. She realized that she no longer even thought of it as theirs, hers and Amos’s, let alone as a site for the futuristic house. Their plan belonged to a different time, as conclusively as the princess herself.

‘There is this, too,’ Chris said. Against the wall were two covered crates. In one, bagged up, lay several clumps of earth thickly studded with metal discs. In the other were sherds of dark brown grooved pottery. It was a hoard of Icenian coins, and the remains of the jars that had contained them.

He detached a single coin from the mass and held it out.

‘Face-Horse,’ she murmured, examining the faint outline of a human profile and remembering the other time she had seen the design, back in the Mead woods on the day of the robbery. He stood back in admiration.

‘Would you like to join my team?’

‘Maybe,’ she laughed.

‘There’s one thing we haven’t come across before.’

They picked out and examined some of the slivers of pottery. Chris said that from the materials and the rudimentary incised decorations it was clear that they were pre-Iron Age, perhaps even as early as Neolithic. Katherine looked up at him in surprise.

‘But the coins they stored belong to the same period as the princess herself?’